13th August 2012 Archive

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has weighed into the row over corporate Facebook pages, telling the The Age it would expect large businesses to be able to act on comments within 24 hours.

Martian robot tourist Curiosity's new operating system will go into production on 13 August after it was successfully uploaded and installed by mission scientists. The boffins had said the remote upgrade represented a major milestone for the craft.

Burgeoning Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) initiative OpenStack received a welcome endorsement last week when Intel teamed up with some local Chinese players to launch the China Open Source Cloud League (COSCL) – a new alliance which will accelerate development of the project in the huge domestic cloud market.

Slaps South Korea into second as UK finishes out of the medals in 21st

Asian countries topped the global broadband charts again in the previous quarter, with plucky Hong Kong knocking long-time champ South Korea from its lofty perch to register the fastest services in the world for both mobile and fixed connectivity.

The Highways Agency is trialling combining GPS tracking with data from its existing sources to provide real-time information to drivers on a 'beta' version of its traffic information map for drivers in England.

Would you buy an Xbox 720 development kit for 20 grand? Someone just has - paying in dollars rather than sterling, of course - after the "Microsoft Xbox Durango Development Kit" appeared on eBay last night.

It seems safe to say that Ultrabooks haven’t given the PC market the shot in the arm that Intel was hoping for. The high prices haven’t helped, of course, and there also seems to be some evidence that many people are turned off by the relatively small 13in screens that dominate the Ultrabook category.

A persistent spin helix sounds like a possessed washing machine rather than a doorway to a massive overhaul in the speed of computer electronics. Yet that's the science behind a breakthrough by IBM boffins, who have used spintronics to store persistent binary data.

Hewlett-Packard's NonStop servers tolerate faults even though new CEO Meg Whitman and Wall Street, which is breathing down her neck, can't. And now, in a hope to offset declines on its HP-UX Itanium server business and get its NonStop Integrity machines into emerging markets, HP has trimmed down the configurations and prices on the NonStops so they are within economic reach of more customers.

Red Hat just about owns the commercial Linux distribution business and it has a pretty hefty slice of the commercial Java application server racket, too. Now it is taking those products up into the clouds by rolling up a commercial distribution of the OpenStack cloud controller that was created by NASA and Rackspace Hosting two years ago.

As the nine-day DDoS hammering of WikiLeaks continues, hacking group AntiLeaks, has said that attacks will continue and widen, but have nothing to do with the Trapwire monitoring system the whistle-blowing site has been documenting.

Embattled file storage mogul Kim Dotcom says his ongoing court battle with US authorities won't stop him from launching new online businesses "this year," including his planned Megabox music service and possibly even a new, Megaupload-style file sharing site.

ARM Holdings, the development company behind the ARM RISC collective that is expected to give x86 a run for its processor money, can't depend on one wafer baker partner, because with the exception of Intel, no one can. And so it is teaming up with GlobalFoundries on future chip tech, mirroring an existing deal with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp.

For a little while, the Apple press fell over itself to analyze the import of a screw that was reportedly going to lock customers and repairers out of the next iPhone forever. The source of the story has now ‘fessed up that to the hoax that set the wires a-buzz.

A group of researchers has come up with a new algorithm that they say can be used to snoop information networks to trace rumor leaks, locate the source of disease epidemics, and even potentially stop terror attacks.